Dr. Bernard McGinn says in his introduction, these treatises and letters have been chosen because of the way in which they manifest how beliefs about the imminent end affected the lives of their adherents..." Perhaps the task for us today is that by seeing how the lives of Lactantius, the monk Adso, Joachim of Fiore, The Spiritual Franciscans and Savonarola were affected by their apocalyptic vision we can recognize how our lives are being affected by the contemporary prophetic sense of the end of history.